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Junk Email/Spams

Spam opponents turn to lawsuits to stop junk e-mail

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) Anti-spam advocates are hoping that lawsuits will do what technology and state laws have so far failed to do — stopping what has become the digital equivalent of swatting away flies at a picnic. "It's a frustrating thing for consumers," Linda Sherry, spokeswoman for San Francisco-based advocacy group Consumer Action, said Monday.

The California Attorney General's office on Friday filed the state's first anti-spam lawsuit against Los Angeles-based PW Marketing, alleging the company violated the state's statute banning spam and engaged in deceptive advertising and unfair business competition. Calling spam "the scourge of the Information Age," Attorney General Bill Lockyer said PW Marketing sent millions of illegal, unsolicited e-mails that advertised books, software and lists of e-mail addresses as a way to make money.
The PW Marketing e-mails violated state anti-spam laws by failing to include a toll-free telephone number or valid e-mail address for people to use to stop future e-mails and did not include "ADV" in the subject line to indicate that they were advertisements, according to the lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court. PW Marketing faces up to $2,500 for each violation or at least $2 million in civil penalties if convicted, the Attorney General's office said. Representatives of the company could not be immediately reached for comment.

Stealth spammers

While the lawsuit is the first anti-spam suit filed on behalf of consumers by state prosecutors, there have been others filed by private companies fed up with spam. San Francisco-based law firm Morrison & Foerster filed a lawsuit in February against marketer Etracks.com alleging it sent thousands of illegal spam e-mails, even after being asked not to, said attorney Megan Auchincloss. "We bill services by the hour," she said. "We were getting thousands and thousands of these e-mails. With employees going through and deleting them on a daily basis it was costly to the firm." Spammers are ignoring the different state laws against spam and routing e-mails through different Internet service providers to hide their locations, Sherry said. Anti-spam technologies don't always work, or they can block e-mails that aren't spam, she added. "I do think additional lawsuits will enhance the deterrence effect," Auchincloss said.

Sherry attributed the problem to "out-of-control marketing" and said companies should not send electronic marketing e-mails unless the recipients have specifically asked for it. However, Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association, said new companies wouldn't be able to build up businesses if they couldn't contact people without getting permission first.

Spammers who break the law and don't provide a way for people to "opt out" of the marketing are ruining it for legitimate marketers, he said. "They've watered down the effectiveness of what could be the next great marketing tool" — the Internet, Mastria said. "There are a lot of legitimate companies out there trying to use e-mail in a responsible and ethical manner."

The California Attorney General's office is asking people to forward samples of spam e-mails and provides information on its Web site at www.ag.ca.gov/spam/. The Telecommunications Research and Action Center has a Web site where people can report spam at www.banthespam.org, and people can send spam samples to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov.

EmailSpams Junk

In the war against spam, a few small victories

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) — They haven't always been on top of the problem. But, as the volume of e-mail spam hits epidemic proportions — not to mention a new level of raunchiness — the makers of Internet security products are starting to take more notice.


And consumers, having long bemoaned the lack of recourse to the mass mailings on everything from a pre-approved mortgage to prescription-free Viagra, finally have some tools at their disposal that may at least ease the problem — even if they can't nip it altogether.

"There are solutions out there that are helping people and I don't think they know about them yet," said Ray Everett Church, chief privacy officer of EPrivacy Group, and co-author of the book Internet Privacy for Dummies.

"As a result, they are now spending two or three more times hitting the delete key than they did a year ago," he said.

Along with a multitude of small companies making products specifically designed to fight spam, larger software companies such as McAfee and Symantec have started to weigh in.

Earlier this year, McAfee acquired SpamKiller from a Norwegian software maker, and incorporated it into its suite of security products. Like many of the newer spam filters coming onto the market, the McAfee solution goes beyond simply blocking suspicious keywords. It attempts to look at the overall context of the message, so it can, for example, distinguish between a recipe, a health care site and a porn pitch in e-mails that contain the word "breast."

"It was back in January, when we were having some planning meetings, that we decided the anti-spam market was something that was going to explode," said Bryson Gordon, product line manager for McAfee. "It is very similar to how the anti-virus market started in the early 1980s. Spam is evolving from being a mere nuisance to being a security threat."

How bad has the spam epidemic become?

A recent story on the online technology news site Wired.com summed up the assortment of offensive, unsolicited material this way: "Naked women performing oral sex with guns pressed to their heads, naked women with large dogs clutching their backs, naked women in pigtails pretending to be daughters having sex with their fathers."

As unseemly as that sounds, some companies say that shocking ordinary Internet users, or robbing youngsters of their innocence are not the only dangers posed by spam.

Avoiding false positives

A growing number of the more than 500,000 identity and credit card thefts that occur online each year are being accomplished through spam, experts say.

The typical method is to send an unsuspecting customer an offer for a product and instruct them to click onto a link contained in the mailing. That lands them on another site where they are asked to enter personal information such as name, address and credit card number.

"Prior to the spam epidemic, people would have to rummage through your garbage to get this information," said Gordon. "Now they are simply sending out 30 million e-mails in an attempt to defraud." He said when McAfee did some market research earlier this year to determine where to focus its new product development, the No. 1 request from customers was for an anti-spam tool.

For Symantec, an impetus for entering the anti-spam market was the glut of mailings received by its own staffers.

Anson Lee, product manager for Norton Internet Security, said that without filtering, spam accounts for about 80% of all the e-mail he receives.

Symantec's new security software — Norton Internet Security 2003, hitting store shelves this month — includes a feature called Norton Spam Alert. Like the McAfee product, it promises to consider the overall context of the message rather than only scanning for certain keywords.

Such an approach can help avoid "false positives," or blocking legitimate e-mails, a tricky problem that is one of the reasons fighting spam has posed such a challenge.

Getting the upper hand over spammers, Lee said, has become something of a cat-and-mouse game, in which spammers routinely change content in order to circumvent filters. Many have become adept at disguising their mailings with legitimate messages in the header field, or even by formatting the entire message to look like a subscription-based newsletter.

Church, of the EPrivacy Group, said that some of the newer anti-spam software products appear to be winning the race against the spammers, at least for now. He said he tested another filter made by the San Francisco company Cloudmark.com, and found that it caught between 70% and 90% of all incoming spam.

Still, he said that ridding the entire Internet of spam may ultimately take more than technology.

"At the end of the day, it is going to be more than just a technical fix. You've got to stop spammers at the source and that is going to require policy changes and new laws."

Junk Email/Spams History & Civil Business Politics

It would be nice if we could take them all to court.

Ref. Read more...

EmailSpams Junk

Spammer to repay customers, now that is a first:

https://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/0...y.ap/index.html

EmailSpams Junk

I am glad that these things are being cracked down and that people are being refunded. Now they need to take this further to all the web sites that promote scams.

Junk Email/Spams

Here's a little tip to try and keep some of your spam/junk emails down.

Never reply to a spam message, even if to request no further messages. Your reply will confirm to the sender that your e-mail address is valid, and you may receive more spam as a result.

Also, if you join certain mailing lists, always make sure that you don't check the box that states they can give your address to other reputable companies.  (If it's checked, uncheck it).  It helps to keep the spam/junk email down some too.  ;)

Junk Email/Spams

I sure wish the average user would stay up to date with what their PC may be doing, it sure would cut down a lot of spam.

Junk Email/Spams Politics Business Civil & History

You hit it on the head, msslmshdy30! Don't click those "remove me from this list" buttons. It only VALIDATES that your e-mail is real and there is a live body at the other end. I have discovered huge e-mail address lists of "remove me" clickers by studying the target for the "remove me buttons" on the spam mail.

It is one of my hobbies to discover who is sending the spam. On a few occasions I was able to scare the spammer into closing their whole web URL by fake ordering more information and using e-mail addresses like agent213@treasury.gov or attorneygeneral@state.gov etc.  Other times I was able to discover who their ISP was and shut them down by letting their ISP know what their subscriber was doing.

I figure I have stopped 150 thousand of the 50 trillion spam messages...sigh....

Do you folks believe (US) Congress or any government can enact legislation to stop and control spam?